Is some money now better than more money later?

There is a risk in choosing to "wait for the trade" instead of buying a comic on a monthly basis. There's always the possibility that if you wait, and enough other people wait, the comic company may decide that the monthly comic isn't doing well enough and cancel it. They do cancel comics pretty quickly these days, and it's entirely possible that a comic could be canceled for poor sales before the point the first trade would have come out.

But you know, the movie business has been dealing with something like that for years. There are plenty of movies which may not do all that well at the theater, but which will eventually sell a heck of a lot of DVDs. And that money isn't inconsiderable. It's not an entirely analogous situation, but obviously it's possible for a business to make such a change when necessary and beneficial.

So how long will it be before comic companies figure out how to make similar estimates of trade sales when deciding whether or not to keep a comic book going?